


the underside of a cloud at sunrise

by sesquidpedalian



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Castlevania Season 3 Fix-It, Enemies to Friends, Gen, I just want them to be friends, POV Multiple, Post-Season/Series 03, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:27:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28484613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sesquidpedalian/pseuds/sesquidpedalian
Summary: In which Taka and Sumi are learning to trust. In which Adrian is learning to be trusted.
Relationships: Alucard & Sumi & Taka
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	the underside of a cloud at sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> i know we're well past the point of this being relevant, but i found this sitting in my google drive and figured it was worth posting. cleaned it up a little bit, but it's still very much entirely because i want these three to be friends. we're pretending the season finale didn't happen :)
> 
> title from that one narnia quote whose context I've forgotten: "And as he spoke, like the flush creeping along the underside of a cloud at sunrise, the colour came back to her white face and her eyes grew bright and she sat up and said, 'Why, I do declare I feel that better. I think I could take a little breakfast this morning.'"

_**i.** the properties of light _

The two of them step back cautiously as Adrian straightens. He towers over them. They look like _children_ , despite the arrows and blades. The sweat and sunlight makes their skin glow. 

It’s a good thing he already caught a big fish today, he thinks absently. It’s been a while since he’s had to cook for more than one person. (It’s been a long time since—a camp fire, low voices, the soothing of hunger that settles into your bones like a long winter.)

“Well then,” he says, unaccustomed to making his voice louder than a self-directed whisper. “Let me show you the castle. Come in and I’ll make dinner.”

He turns and starts walking. Either they don’t know he can hear them whispering hopefully amongst themselves or they don’t care, having already won his willingness to teach them. The sunset is in its beginning stages, the first layers of gentle colour sliding across the golden evening. Sypha would like that, smiling and pointing at all the colours she never tires of, and Trevor would roll his eyes because he’s a big brute with no appreciation for aesthetics, but he would look too. When Adrian turns back to glance at Sumi and Taka, he thinks he sees sharp blue sky reflected in their eyes, for just a moment.

They follow him through the castle’s front entrance. When they arrive at the kitchen, the whole of it looks unbearably dusty and dim. Did Adrian really live like this for months? Every little thing he hadn’t even considered in his total isolation suddenly strikes him as unspeakably embarrassing. The layers of dust in the darkest corner of the room where he never goes. The lone cucumber clearly sitting on the top shelf of one of the cabinets whose doors are ajar. The little damp circle on the table from all the times he’s set down his still-wet cup there because he washed it right before refilling it for his next meal.

The dolls. Oh dear God, the _dolls_.

Taka is already across the room, bent over and peering at them like a curious puppy. “What are these? Are they magic? Can I touch them?”

Alucard darts across the room, red flaring at the edges of his vision as he moves faster than a human should, and cries, “No!”

Taka flinches, hands coming up into a fighting stance, and he doesn’t look like a child anymore—he looks like Trevor, who would wake up from nightmares during their travels with his body halfway to a steady crouch, fingers on his whip before his eyes opened all the way. On instinct, Adrian’s eyes flick to Sypha—to Sumi. She has gone completely still.

A pause that feels too long.

“They’re not magic,” Adrian says finally, gruff to cover up his awkwardness. He cups them in his hands for a moment, can’t bear to treat the only company he’s had for months roughly. Then, panicking briefly, he shoves them into the nearest cupboard. “They’re not important.”

He’ll take them back out later and hide them somewhere safer.

Adrian clears his throat. “I’ll start making dinner. Please, sit down.” He gestures to the chairs and table in the middle of the room, wincing internally when he realizes they too are grimy and dust-coated. The two of them sit down without mentioning it.

“Tomorrow,” Adrian says, thinking out loud as he prepares the fish, “I can take you two to the armory. I’m sure you’d like to see all the artifacts my father—” a flash of a red and black cape, the glint of consecrated metal, a catch in Adrian’s rusty voice “—that my father collected.” Adrian shakes his head a bit to clear out the cobwebs, and nearly slices his finger off for his troubles. “How does that sound?”

“That would be _wonderful_ ,” Sumi enthuses. “We’d love to see it all.”

“Is the cucumber magic?” Taka ventures, sounding a touch more nervous than before.

“Don’t be stupid,” Adrian hears Sumi hiss in Japanese.

“No, not to worry, you can touch the cucumber if you’d like.”

Sumi says something very fast and very quiet. Adrian only catches a venomous “ _Taka!_ ”

“You ask questions then,” Taka hisses back.

“Is something the matter?” Adrian asks, for the sake of politeness. They both freeze when he turns away from the kitchen counter. Adrian does something with his face that he hopes looks sufficiently like a smile to put them more at ease.

“Not at all.” Taka smiles back easily, the meaninglessly friendly smile of a stranger. His eyes are hazel brown, his hair only a few shades darker. Adrian doesn’t know what it means that he had been expecting ice-blue, bright as sparks.

****_**ii.** the lion tamers _

Alucard laughs when Sumi jumps him during sparring, because he doesn’t know any better. He doesn’t know that she learned through practice and not theory the best angle to cut at to take off a vampire’s head. Doesn’t know about the sweep of blood she learned to dance to instead of music. Doesn’t know that a vampire letting her close is just as dangerous as the other way around. If the blade in her belt made it to his throat, would his blood be bright as rubies like the others…?

She remembers to laugh in time though. The longer he does not think they’re a threat, the more time they’ll have to learn about him and his mysterious castle.

He is shockingly warm beneath her, something like human when his mouth is closed and his eyes turned away. His golden hair is fanned out and messy, and he sprawls like a satiated lion on the grass. Fortunately, Sumi is not stupid enough to think any lion is tamed just because it will roll on its belly for her.

The fact that she can (for one terrible, flickering instant) pretend Alucard is human also means that Taka has to look at that half-human beauty full in the face. From the near imperceptible twitch of Taka’s mouth as he smiles, Alucard is baring his fangs again.

(“ _I’m not even sure he knows he’s doing it. It’s_ creepy _, Sumi. He’s so close to being human sometimes. It’s just… I’m afraid we’re going to forget who he is. It’s been a long time since anyone cooked fish for us._ ”)

It has been a long time since anyone has cooked a full meal for them. Now it’s just the question of what he’ll ask for in exchange.

Right on cue, Taka whines that he’s hungry. Alucard chuckles in that silky-smooth, murmuring way he does. Sumi resolutely fixes her mind on the memory of the grinning merchant who failed to tell them his ‘vampire poisons’ were just a noxious mixture of cheap wine and raw eggs. “How does lunch sound?” Alucard asks. “And then we can look at the rest of the armoury in the afternoon.”

“There’s _more_?” Taka blurts delightedly.

Sumi knows her role just as well. “Yes, but first, make us food, servant!” She thumps her fist playfully on Alucard’s shoulder, doubtful that even punching him full force would have an effect.

“You greedy children,” Alucard admonishes, standing and hoisting Sumi effortlessly up with him. It is so fond and gentle that something in Sumi aches to believe in it, but she knows aching like the scars on her arms, and she thinks of dirty hands reaching for her, and she tells herself she only has to pretend for a little while longer.

**_iii._ ** _superposition_

“When can we learn to do the lightning magic?” Taka whines, drooping melodramatically from across the clearing he and Sumi and Adrian have been sparring in.

“In time,” Adrian replies. “All things in time.”

“But what time?” Sumi asks, more forceful, more serious. “You told us you could teach it to us days ago. Haven’t we proven our physical combat skills enough?”

“Of course,” Adrian says, placating. He senses, with whatever human empathy his mother gave him, whatever kindness he desperately hopes he managed to keep kindled under the ragged scar on his chest, their frustration and fear and somewhere deep underneath, the same loneliness as his own. But he has breached the surface of the sea of memory he spent months drowning in, and with the first gasp of lucidity comes the certainty that they will leave him behind the moment he is no longer useful. He wants to hoard them away, his first friends since—

Since the castle became his.

But humans do not take kindly to being hoarded, so Adrian hoards what he knows instead, while still doing what he can to satiate their curiosity. It would be cruel and dishonourable to withhold all his parents’ accumulated knowledge. 

(He finds he has grown accustomed to being a pawn to the greater good. Guard the Belmont hold. Preserve his mother’s memory. Fulfill the prophecy that named him Alucard. 

Teaching these two and letting them walk away with those teachings is the greater good, however much the aching, foolish child in him howls against Adrian’s ribs.)

“All right,” he says, swallowing down his beaten, beating heart. “Come on. Let’s go down to my father’s keep. I’ll teach you everything you could possibly want to know about electricity.”

The two of them perk up like excited puppies. _Like Sypha_. (He remembers, abruptly, that he never got to show her his favourite books in the castle library.)

They, all three, pick up their weapons and gear and start trudging toward the castle.

By the time the moon is well on its way through the night sky, Sumi and Taka are half-asleep, shoulders pressed together, nodding droopingly as Adrian continues his lecture.

“—and thus the presence of metals and dissolved salts may improve the strength of the magic, allowing the user to cast the lightning further and cause greater damage…” Adrian raises an eyebrow. “I don’t suppose you two are actually listening anymore.”

“It’s your fault for starting the lesson so late,” Sumi grumbles, bleary-eyed. Taka is too busy being asleep and drooling to add anything to the discussion.

“The longer I know you two for, the more you behave like petulant children. Are you quite sure you’re vampire hunters here to learn all the knowledge in the world?”

Sumi hunches her shoulders like it hurts. (Another, in her place, would have unfurled into laughter, would have dismissed the jab out of hand, dodged as easily as Adrian’s claymore.) “Yes, of course we are. We are not _liars_. We came all this way just to—”

“I know,” Adrian says immediately, regretting how sleepiness loosens his tongue. There is someone broad-shouldered and brilliant-eyed hunching in the shadows of this hold, this late at night. “I’m sorry. I did not mean to be rude.” He dips his head apologetically, can’t quite meet her eye. (Will they hate him soon? Will they leave like Belmont and Belnades did? Adrian yearns for the rusty, dusky sound of Trevor’s laugh.)

“We can continue this lesson first thing in the morning.” Sumi peers at Adrian, something like worry in her eyes. “Right?”

“After breakfast,” Adrian says mildly. He reaches out to help Sumi up. She doesn’t seem to notice the proffered hand, preoccupied with shaking Taka.

“Come on, get up, lazybones.”

“Hmpff,” says Taka.

“No more sleeping on the ground for you.” Adrian yawns, already half turned towards the stairs. “Off to a _proper_ bed now, Belmont,” he says dryly.

“Belmont?” Taka’s voice comes out clear and alert.

Adrian thumps the heel of his palm to his forehead, feeling shame slither its way down his spine. “ _Taka_. My apologies. I don’t know what came over me.” He gestures upward, in the general direction of everyone’s bedrooms, feeling his face heat. “I think we could all do with some rest. Good night, you two.”

He leaves them in the keep, murmuring to each other like ghosts on the wind.

****_**iv.** phantoms in the corridors _

There are ghosts in the castle’s corridors. Taka is no psychic, but he knows they’re there all the same. When he wanders down the wrong corridor, he sees a smear of ash along one wall, in the shape of a bird-boned hand. There is rubble cordoning off an entire hall. One room has glass shards spilling out of its doorway and Taka makes sure to step around it. He’s cut his hands on glass before, found he had no taste for blood. (He’s hidden in abandoned buildings before, when the local inns leered with distrusting townsfolk. Sumi would sweep away glittering debris and glare out through broken windows when it was Taka’s turn to sleep.)

Taka shivers. Stone is always so _cold_.

“Is something wrong?” asks a false velvet voice.

From down the hall, blocking the door Taka came in through, Alucard tilts his head curiously, expression unreadable. Taka doesn’t know what to make of the furrow in Alucard’s brow as the dhampir steps into lunging distance. Sumi trails apologetically behind.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Taka says, forcing it to sound like an admission. He shuffles a bit, darts his gaze away.

“You could have woken me up,” Sumi says. She seems genuinely annoyed.

“Yes,” Alucard murmurs. “These parts of the castle—The rubble is still loose. It would be dangerous to go wandering through this place on your own.” Alucard holds out his hand, expression cool and bland. “Come on, let’s go back. There will be plenty of time in the morning to explore.” (His golden eyes flicker worryingly on the word _time_ , and Taka grabs desperately at anything that will help him figure out what on Earth _Alucard_ is getting out of all this. He knows though. He saw. Solitude can make monsters of any starving hero.)

“Can you show us more of the castle?”

Alucard’s mouth quirks up on one side, looking for all the world like an amused cat. Taka wants to move away, but he knows what people see when they look at him and Sumi, long lashes and high cheekbones, knows they imagine taming the movement of muscle under their skin, knows there is plenty of use to his total knowledge of where his body starts and ends. So he doesn’t move, makes himself lean a little closer.

“Perhaps. But in the morning. There is no rush, after all.” The worrying flicker in his expression is back. It pings _loneliness_. Taka smiles.

“Of course. In the morning.”

“We have lots of time,” Sumi says lightly, and it means something different for each of them.

“Yeah, and I want to know more about the lightning magic!” Taka declares, throwing himself into the lies he’s shaped for himself.

“The electricity?” Alucard corrects mildly, raising one beautiful eyebrow.

“No, the lightning magic. You said there are magicians who can do it. Like they control fire and ice.” Hot and cold. Taka hates the cold. Blood shines so strangely on snow, and it splashes so much farther than it should.

“Ah, so you _were_ paying attention.” The eyebrow goes back down, something like amusement playing its way across Alucard’s face. Taka, of course, knows that face. He is the silly, naive little clown to this pampered prince of a half-vampire boy. It is only a matter of time, Taka promises himself. This guttering, wavering _wanting_ in him only has to dwell for so much longer.

“Of course I was paying attention! You have so much to teach us and there is so much I want to know! Like, what about sweat? And armour?”

“What about it?” Alucard asks, humouring him. Taka pretends to ignore the feather-light touch of a hand on his elbow, guiding him away from the forbidden corridors.

“If metal and dissolved stuff makes it easier for the lightning to travel, then you could take out whole groups of guards no problem!” He makes a sweeping gesture with one open palm. “How do we learn to do that?”

Now Alucard looks genuinely surprised. “I thought you were asleep when I talked about that.”

“Well...” 

“I’m glad.” Alucard looks wistful. (Taka’s beginning to suspect he never _doesn’t_ look wistful. What does a guy like him even have to be wistful _for_? This Belmont he tells bawdy stories about, this Belnades whose name makes a rueful smile cross his face, this mother and father Taka cannot begin to imagine.) “I’m going to teach you everything I know. I promise you that.”

Taka is startled to find himself wishing fiercely that Alucard means it.

_**v.**_ _amplitude_

Adrian starts to notice things, coming out of the fugue state of the last few months. There are _people_ in the castle now, and it is not the same life it once was, but human interaction sidelines, briefly, haltingly, the ghostly memories that were crowding these halls. It’s almost nice.

But then Sumi winces when he smiles at her one morning after practice, and he remembers imagining red hair instead of black, short and unruly instead of neat and straight. It’s _Sumi_ , not _Sypha_ , though the two words had been starting to blend into the same language for him. A language of thought and longing and memory. Sypha doesn’t falter at his teeth, he realizes.

Sumi has only ever known his teeth as a threat.

They are not speaking the same language.

The first step to learning any new language, his father taught him, was to master the basics. The alphabet, simple vocabulary, common conversational idioms. (Even now, here his father is, holding Adrian tucked close like a little owlet, blinking wonderingly at all his father has to show him, at all the knowledge contained in one being. Here is Adrian, hiding in that black-red cape, feeling warm and safe in his father’s grasp, an ancient book splayed in front of them, all the possibilities of the universe and his life in it spiralling unknowably out from that point.)

Sumi and Taka’s alphabet is painted with blood. Their words are spelled from broken bones and gored bodies, quick lies and averted eyes, the haunting specter of never belonging to anywhere. This ragged vocabulary is all they have known since birth. Adrian spells his first word in their language like this:

On the last day of the second week after their arrival at the castle, a wolf comes raging out of the woods. The three of them are in the clearing not too far from the castle, though just far enough that the wolf, starved and half-mad from it, finds them and snarls. They are, all three, in fighting stances already, panting from sparring and bewildered at the prospect of fighting alongside someone new.

The wolf lunges at them, and Adrian, shifting into wolf form without even thinking, tackles it to the ground. Pinned, it snaps at him, all teeth and terror.

Adrian growls back, manages to sink his teeth into the other wolf’s scruff. He drags it over to the bucket where he put the fish he caught earlier that morning. _Look_ , he does not say, tipping the bucket over for the other wolf.

It snuffles hungrily, and snatches the biggest fish in the pile. By the time Adrian has shifted back to human form, the wolf is gone. “Not to worry,” are the first words out of his mouth as he crouches and rights the bucket again. “I’ll wash the remaining fish extra carefully tonight.”

Taka and Sumi are gaping at him.

“What? I did tell you I can turn into a wolf.”

“Well, yes, but…”

“We weren’t quite expecting _that_.”

Adrian shrugs. “I’ve been doing it since I was a child. You get used to it.”

Taka mutters something under his breath that sounds like, “Are you sure about that?” Sumi takes a few steps closer, eyes wide like her own actions are a shock to her. Adrian is grateful anyway.

“Once, when I was six,” Adrian says, “my mother couldn’t find me for three entire hours because I shifted into a wolf and hid in a burrow I’d found not far from here in the forest. From that day on, I was never allowed to change forms during hide-and-go-seek again.”

Sumi and Taka lean into him and chuckle as they walk back to the castle.

_**vi.** sheathed claws, blunted teeth_

Sumi doesn’t know what to make of Alucard. She doesn’t know what to _do_ , and it makes her want to crawl out of her skin and hide in a cold, dry cave until Taka comes back from hunting and tells her it’s safe out. But there are no caves. Just this maddening, inexplicable castle, and its owner, so soft she wonders what she would find if she carved him open. Bones? Or just an endless expanse of downy feathers like the ones stuffed in the pillows he gave them?

She kind of likes the pillows. She’s been thinking of stealing them when she and Taka leave, though their delicate, silky coverings won’t last long on the road.

They must leave this place.

“ _Why won’t he tell us about the other parts of the castle? I didn’t want to think this was a trick, but…_ ” Taka looked as torn as Sumi felt last night. “ _I found cuffs. The other day. In the hold. They’ll tie down a vampire, negate his powers. We could take what we can. He isn’t going to want to help us for much longer. We’ve already stayed too long._ ”

That’s the start of a plan, and they have lived too long to not recognize what planning inevitably means. It whispers feverishly in the back of her mind as Alucard hands her a plate of food. “Thank you,” she remembers to murmur. She thinks of a leering priest, whose repulsively tight grip on her arm did not slacken until she choked out a thousand thanks to a god she did not believe in, for a sanctuary she did not want, in a church she should not have been in.

Then, to her immeasurable surprise, Alucard places another bowl in front of her. “You said you liked that wild mushroom soup I made, so I thought I’d collect a few extra today while I was out hunting.” His smile doesn’t dip so close to a baring of fangs anymore, these days. She can just see the tips of them, knows they grow long and sharp when a vampire wills it. (They are ineffectual as weapons once broken off though, shrinking to the size of a regular tooth.) 

Sumi wants to push him away. But she also wants to drink the soup. Food is a miracle for her and Taka still. Does that make Alucard a miracle-maker?

It is good soup, she decides, once she is finished chugging it. Taka, in the time she was preoccupied, seems to have acquired a bowl of it as well. The faint curve of his mouth makes her want to stick her tongue out at him.

“There’s no need to drink so fast. You’ll make yourself sick.” Adrian—Alucard—chides like nothing Sumi has ever known. (She thinks that she could learn to know it.) He speaks so softly it is effortless to forget the inherent sharpness of his mouth, the weapons he carries just by virtue of being what he is.

“It’s fine. I’m used to it.” It doesn’t matter so much what Alucard knows about them now. He won’t for much longer.

“Still. There is no rush now. I can make you more soup tomorrow.” (Sumi thinks that once, she might have cried over an offer like that. But once was a long time ago.)

“I was hoping you could show us around the castle more,” Taka pipes up. He gives up on stirring listlessly at his soup, gives Alucard one final chance to prove he isn’t lying to them about wanting to help. They have been giving him final chances for over a week.

“You’ve seen all the important parts. What else do you want to look at?”

“The machinery that makes the castle move.”

Alucard’s voice takes on a warning tone and Sumi tenses. “I already told you I can’t make it move. And yes, I’m _quite_ sure of it.”

There is a long silence. Alucard’s last chance fluttering away feels like a palpable thing in her pulse. The bed, the cuffs, the plan. Solid as the beat of her heart.

But maybe she could learn how to make this soup first, she thinks, considering the last drops in the bowl and wondering if they’re worth the indignity of licking. It would take a miracle to make her stay, but perhaps Alucard is something of a miracle-maker after all.

**_vii._ ** _sacrificial lamb, holy ghost_

He deserves this. His father died mourning Adrian. It is only fair Adrian dies mourning his father.

(But maybe that’s not how this needs to work. Maybe this time, he can steal one thing for himself out of the jaws of God.)

**_viii._ ** _night terrors_

The first words out of Alucard’s mouth: “What’s wrong?”

Taka’s hands curl tight. Alucard is on his feet before Taka and Sumi can make it halfway across the room. And he’s still talking.

“You’re not hurt, are you? Is someone in the castle? Do you need something?” He pauses, seems to weigh his options. He does not reach for them. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“We’re not _children_ ,” Taka snaps, facade slipping. Sumi presses an open hand to his chest, reminds him of himself. He dips his head down, away. “...But that is not what we are here for.”

“You have been so kind to us,” she says, taking over, voice soft. With her other hand, she reaches out to Alucard. “Let us reward you.”

“There’s no need for rewards,” Alucard says, just as soft. “I am carrying on my mother’s legacy. The Belmonts’ legacy. You know this, don’t you? I will not be what my father was.” His eyes flick down to Sumi’s hand on his chest. “I’m sorry,” he says to it.

Taka reaches for the knife hidden under his clothes. Betrayal starts at an apology, ends at a grave. It’s not the other way around. It’s never the other way around. 

“I’m sorry,” Alucard says again, this time to Taka. “I didn’t mean to treat you like a child. I know you have suffered much at the hands of cruel creatures from both sides of my heritage.” He wraps his beautiful, perfect, fine-boned hand around the gleaming blade of the knife in Taka’s hand. Blood, bright as rubies, drips down his palm. Unnatural. Wrong.

“Adrian…” Sumi starts. Still soft, more broken. They’d agreed to use his name, to foster intimacy, except now she says it like she means it.

“I’m sorry you were driven to do this. I’m sorry I got up, too, but I wasn’t going to let you tie me there. My penance is more than physical pain.” Alucard’s hand tightens on the blade. It is sharpened to a killing point, or would be, if this were anything like a human they were fighting. A long breath. “Will you give me the knife?”

Taka lets go of the knife.

Adrian throws it aside. It does not go as far as it should, with his supernatural strength.

“You…You knew our plans?”

“I overheard you last night.” He glances away, a faint flush on his cheeks. “I’m sorry also for eavesdropping. Will you believe me when I say I didn’t mean to?”

Taka wants to. By the gods does he _want_ to. His arms limp at his sides, he almost nods.

Sumi shakes her head like trying to break out of a reverie. “No.” It is angry, not a shout but the threat of one. “You are lying to us.”

“I’m not.”

“You _are_. No one has ever told us the whole truth. No one has ever tried to help us without taking advantage of us.” This unbending truth drives Taka back into himself.

Taka gives up on wanting. He had to give up on wanting the moment he entered Cho’s court, and old dogs do not learn new tricks.

“We have been lied to and cheated across half the world,” Taka says. “Why should you be any different?”

“If you will not teach us how to make the castle move, if you will not show us those parts of the castle you try so hard to hide, if you will not give us the information we are asking for, then there is no reason for us to let a monster like you live.”

Adrian—Alucard—sighs, pained and weary. Taka is about to get angrier, when he sees the sheen of tears in Adrian’s eyes.

“I am a monster. It’s true.” He raises his hands, spreads them in crude mockery of claws with a rueful smile that bares the tips of his fangs. The blood carves him into sharper lines, makes Taka really _see_ the way his nails end in points, the way he towers over them even now. “These hands killed my own father. _Of course_ I deserve to die for what I’ve done. But there is still good to be done in the world. I’d like to teach you, if you’re still willing, about the good that is left in this world.You are not the only monster hunters. You are not the only lost orphans. You do not need to be alone in this.”

Sumi looks at Taka, and no one else would be able to see the twitch of her face, how utterly torn she is inside. Taka agrees with her—the pillows in this place are so nice. Soft.

“Will you show us the mechanism to make the castle move, then?” Taka keeps his voice cool and even. (His was an unusual education. He knew how to lie before he knew how to fight.) “Even if it doesn’t work, we would like to see it.”

“Yes.” Alucard—Adrian—takes a few steps back, settles on the edge of the bed. “I can show it to you. Yes.” He breathes in, slowly. “Is that a deal? Will you let me teach you?”

“Yes.” Sumi and Taka say it in one voice, and the terror of trust gives way to relief from a tension they had never realized they were holding. They have been one in all things, always, and here and now, they step forward as one.

Adrian tilts his head down, breathes out, ragged and shaky at the end, and Sumi and Taka realize as one, as always, that he is crying, tears snaking down his face silently.

They look at each other. This is new.

They sit on either side of Adrian. It is almost like their plan, the closeness, the envelopment, the brush of skin on skin, but distorted, made strange.

“How did you even overhear us?” Taka asks, undoing his hair, watching the exits. He tucks his legs under himself. On Adrian’s other side, the sound of Sumi twisting to get a better view of the windows.

“My hearing is somewhat better than that of the average human,” he replies in a flat rush of words between quiet sobs. “Also,” he gasps, “I _do_ speak Japanese.”

_**ix.** _ _codetta_

It’s raining.

That morning, at breakfast, Adrian takes one look out the window and declares, “Well, I have been meaning to catch up on some reading.”

“What?” It’s accidental, the way the two of them bob up from their food with identical wide-eyed curiosity, but Adrian laughs.

“You want to go outside in this weather?” he asks.

“No...not really.”

“We have been out in worse before though.”

Adrian, washing the dishes, waves a soap-flecked hand at them. “If we don’t have to go out, let’s not. Trust me,” he says, lifting his head to observe the deep grey sky. “It will get worse.”

It does get worse.

It’s enough to be called a storm now, has earned its name through vicious flickers of licking lightning and booms of thunder that make all of them flinch, or at least twitch nervously. The three of them lounge around Adrian’s bedroom, sprawled on armchairs and soft blankets.

Taka twists in his chair until he’s upside down and can get a proper look at the window nearest to Adrian, who is flipping idly through a book that looks much lighter in his hands than it is. His hair is tied up in a loose bun, and it makes him look so...odd. Domestic, perhaps. _Open._ It makes Taka want to leap at him, just to see what will happen.

Sumi is settled in a nest of pillows and blankets at the foot of the bed, her back pressed to the wood of the frame, her eyes flicking up at every boom of thunder to scan and rescan the door, Taka, the window just within her field of view. Because of this, she is just in time to catch the Look spreading across Taka’s face.

“No. Don’t,” she says in Japanese.

“I didn’t even do anything!” Taka cries in turn.

“You’re _going_ to, and it’s going to be stupid.”

“Not like you’ve never done a stupid thing before. The birds—”

“Do not even _think_ of mentioning the birds! And anyway, what do my past choices have anything to do with your present stupidity?”

“Just watch. This is going to be great.”

Adrian is now looking up, thoroughly bemused. “All right…” he starts. “My Japanese isn’t quite good enough to catch all that. Is someone being stupid?”

Taka and Sumi snort simultaneously, then glare at each other. Taka makes a show of gathering his limbs under himself. Sumi groans and gets up so she’ll be out of the way in case the fool misses the bed. “Good luck,” she says.

“Oh fuck—” Adrian yelps, finally catching on.

A blur of red as Taka pushes off the armchair in a easy, fluid leap, and then Taka is tucked like a child in Adrian’s arms, the sheets a rumpled disaster around them.

“Good _Lord_ , Taka! What on _Earth_ was that for?” Adrian gives Taka a good shake, but doesn’t let go.

Taka is cackling like an idiot.

“He’s trying to give me a heart attack, Sumi,” Adrian mutters. Adrian’s bun is coming undone, strands of hair wisping across his face. He huffs. “God help me, he’s actually going to kill me.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sumi replies cheerfully. She climbs onto the bed with them.

Taka’s laughter dies down slowly. Between giggles, he says, “Hey, are you going to, uh, let go of me now?”

“Absolutely _not_.”

Taka squirms, helpless in the face of literally supernatural strength. “I like this less now.”

“Good,” Adrian purrs. With his foot, he nudges his discarded book away, lets Sumi settle with her back against his side.

“Sumi,” Taka whines. “Help.”

She laughs. “You did this to yourself, idiot.” She does lightly smack Adrian, to limited effect.

“Hey, I cannot be held responsible for my mistakes!”

“And what a mistake you’ve made. The big scary vampire has you in his clutches,” Adrian murmurs, showing his teeth.

“You’re not even a full vampire,” Sumi cuts in. “We could take you down no problem, you little baby.”

“Oh?” Adrian loops one arm around her easily, the barest brush of his pointed nails under her chin. Taka takes advantage of the distraction to wriggle free. “Could you now?”

“Yes!” Taka and Sumi shout together, twisting around and tackling Adrian as one.

Laughing, the three of them crumple into a pile of splayed limbs and contentment. The roar of thunder booms as though from very far away. The world narrows down to this room, to this bed, to these soft breaths, like the flush creeping along the underside of a cloud at sunrise.


End file.
